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Friday, September 25, 2009

Jennifer's Body

Oh my. This movie is just bad. Jennifer's Body is Diablo Cody's follow-up script to her Oscar winning Juno (which despite which I assume I gave a glowing review to, was highly overrated). This time she ventures into the teen-horror-comedy genre. Megan Fox stars as Jennifer a possessed cheerleader who starts killing her male classmates. Starring along side her is Amanda Seyfried as Needy, her slightly dorky "all she needs to do to be hot is take off her glasses" stereotype.

Just looking at the trailers you can tell the target audience. Seriously, Megan Fox in a horror movie with lesbian undertones. Who do you think wants to see this movie? On the subject of Megan Fox- she's simply terrible. At least Seyfried can act. It's a terrible role, but she's able to make it work. Fox on the other hand, is downright awful. It worked fine in Transformers because the real stars were the robots. And it could work here, because she's supposed to be a sexy husk of a person. But instead of looking alluring, she just looks confused.

The script certainly has Diablo Cody all over it. From gems like "it has to be true, it's on the Wikipedia," to "Move on dot org" (in which Jennifer is telling Needy to get past the fact they were almost killed in a fire). If you want to bring trendy catch phrases into your script to show off the hipness of your characters, fine, it worked or Juno. But don't call it "The Wikipedia." It just makes high schoolers look even more vapid than intended. I know these are little quibbles, but if you're going to build your whole trademark around quick witty dialog, you better make it a lot tighter than that.

It had a relatively small budget (most of which probably went to their troublesome star) so I have little doubt it'll turn a pretty profit. Though it did have a mediocre opening weekend- so here's hoping movie going audiences aren't being drawn in by this movie's one trick.